Sunday at the Roxy - cartoon shorts

Here's a few animation videos for your Sunday entertainment. They are from a Canadian site that has a large archive, going back many years. I watched several and have to say I found them a bit on the grim side. Maybe it's the effect of the long, dark winters. Anyway, they're interesting and well done.

The Cat Came Back 1988 - 7 min 37 s

The Owl Who Married a Goose: An Eskimo Legend
1974 - 7 min 38 sec

Night Angel 1986 - 18 min 41 s

Morning in new world

It's 3am and I just woke up thinking about global warming, about how we continue to debate and deny it and how trivial this debate is. The planet's climate is changing as we speak. World wide, global climate change. It effects every aspect of life as we know it. We could have avoided global warming if we started making changes years ago. Patterns this massive, this complex develop slowly but there is a tipping point for all change and scientists say we're past it now. A new global weather cycle has already begun. Noticed? It will replace the old one, the one we evolved with, rose to dominance in and eventually unbalanced with our smoke and gasses, our destruction of carbon dioxide-eating, oxygen-producing trees, with our daily breeding of billions of methane-producing animals for slaughter, with our sprawling, worldwide mile after mile of concrete high rise, heat producing cities, we are past the point of no return. I'm afraid it will be interesting. Change one. Change all.

I don't think I'm being a doom bird about it. I guess I woke up with global warming on my mind because of a conversation I had with the Charter guy yesterday afternoon. After he (hopefully) fixed the problem we've been having with our internet connection he came to my office and we chatted for awhile. I think he was curious about what I was up to. My office is, well, colorful I guess you could say, especially as the rest of the house is practically empty, nothing on the the walls, no book shelves, no TV, no mementos scattered everywhere, no treasures on display. White walls, white rugs, and emptiness. We call it our zen house, then there's my room, with a tiny puppet theatre built into one of the book shelves in my "shipping department" amid a general overflow of rocks, shells, trilobites, feathers, piles of papers, boxes of zines, briefcases, my Chaitanya deities and world alter, including a hand-carved coyote some old guy I met in the desert gave me and a fabulous, fiddling frog. You get the idea. My little world. It's a big contrast to the sense deprivation in the rest of house. Anyway, we talked about global warming. I started it naturally. I guess it's been in the back of my mind ever since.

At the moment, five little fruit fly guys have made themselves at home on my monitor. One is crawling off to the right and another one is standing on the third word in the second to the last sentence of the last paragraph. On my monitor the word is "naturally". I don't know what it is for you. It all depends on the size of your monitor, your browser, resolution, all that. Or was. They move quickly. And another fellow is rubbing his legs over the fourth word of the first sentence of this paragraph. That should be "five" for everyone as it's at the beginning of the paragraph rather than the end. They are having quite a time of it but I'm going have to close their little light field down now and see of I can get back to sleep. Ta.

Jimi, the Rockridge Institute, and the rest of my day

Mr. Lee drove to Soda Springs Idaho today to pick up an off-road trailer he bought on Ebay. He'll be back Sunday evening. All in all he'll drive over 1200 miles in about a day and a half. I didn't go because it would be too tough, my knee being in this shape. I slept until after noon, healing takes a lot of energy, then worked on the driftwork website. Unfortunately I was working on a wide screen and checking it now on the laptop, I see it isn't quite right. Later. I'm done for the day.

So no matinee, maybe tomorrow, but here's a sound clip you might enjoy. I'm listening to it at the moment and find it pretty interesting. It's a raw mix of comments, often from concerts, by Jimmy Hendrix.

And from the Rockridge Institute, a very sobering look at the accomplishments made by the Bush administration. Their point is that actually Bush is not an incompetent boob. In fact, his administration has done a lot to advance the conservative agenda. The problems we complain about are not because Bush is an idiot. It is because the conservative philosophy is so terribly flawed and designed to benefit only the wealthiest. Here's an example of the changes the conservatives have ushered in. It's chilling.

The idea that Bush is incompetent is a curious one. Consider the following (incomplete) list of major initiatives the Bush administration, with a loyal conservative Congress, has accomplished:

* Centralizing power within the executive branch to an unprecedented degree
* Starting two major wars, one started with questionable intelligence and in a manner with which the military disagreed
* Placing on the Supreme Court two far-right justices, and stacking the lower federal courts with many more
* Cutting taxes during wartime, an unprecedented event
* Passing a number of controversial bills such as the PATRIOT Act, the No Child Left Behind Act, the Medicare Drug bill, the Bankruptcy bill and a number of massive tax cuts
* Rolling back and refusing to enforce a host of basic regulatory protections
* Appointing industry officials to oversee regulatory agencies
* Establishing a greater role for religion through faith-based initiatives
* Passing Orwellian-titled legislation assaulting the environment — “The Healthy Forests Act” and the “Clear Skies Initiative” — to deforest public lands, and put more pollution in our skies
* Winning re-election and solidifying his party’s grip on Congress

These aren’t signs of incompetence. As should be painfully clear, the Bush administration has been overwhelmingly competent in advancing its conservative vision. It has been all too effective in achieving its goals by determinedly pursuing a conservative philosophy.

It’s not Bush the man who has been so harmful, it’s the conservative agenda.

More at the Rockridge Institute.

Driftwork and Lucky Pierre update

I got the contributor issues of Driftwork off in the mail today. I forgot to mention to them that they can get extra copies at cost. I was over focused, I guess. I get like that a lot. I also finally filled an order made by the Special Collections Library at the University of Wisconsin. They wanted another copy of Reddog Review #5. They ordered it before I had the knee surgery but I didn't get around to sending it until now. It was out of print so I had to make more copies. Plus Driftwork had be finished. Susan wanted to take it to a writer's conference this weekend. First things first.

I still haven't had a chance to get to my PO box. Unless something went terribly wrong, Lucky Pierre is there waiting for me. Roy of  "Why I Blog" found him under his house, a once proud little fellow fallen on hard times, gigging as a Santa doll. Roy kindly mailed him to me and when he arrives, Lucky Pierre not Roy, I will clean him up and he can join my puppet theatre. There's hope for everyone.

Replay

I gotta bitch. I'm sick at heart now that it's clear Special Investigator Patrick Fitzgerald has let Cheney, Rove and Bush skate after exposing Valerie Plame. Un-fucking-believable. No consequences. Nada. I’d say this makes it official. Our Republican "leaders" are completely ABOVE THE LAW. They can commit treason, lie us into war, rig and steal our elections, cheat, take and make bribes, spy on us, torture us, etc, etc, etc. No one will stand up to them or for us. We know how far the Right got in Germany. Now, with the new name, "neoconservative" and new look, "ownership society", they're really cleaning up. Americans are standing in the slaughterhouse line but are too stupid or too busy to notice or care. Old story. Makes me sick.

Wednesday recap

Driftwork went to the printer today. This issue took less than two weeks! It's small, 20 pages, but nice. That's five sheets of paper, four pages to a sheet. Next issue, however, I want a little more time putting it together. After I got back from the printer this afternoon I noticed an unacceptable error on the cover so tomorrow I have to go back and get it reprinted. That sucks! A few more passes and we would have caught this one. We also noticed, after the fact, that there's a couple of small errors inside, font sizes that differ by a point, but things a person can live with. But overall, working with a partner and very tight deadlines worked just fine. I can see doing an occasional publication this way.

Naturally, there's still a lot more to do. Upload a photo of the cover, install a PayPal button on the Driftwork website, add supplemental color photos for this issue, add submissions guidelines. This time I just did a blog post about the guidelines but I'm happy to say, we've already got a couple of pieces for a new issue. However, at the moment I'm taking a break and resting my knee. I'm still on crutches.

Saturday matinee - Stevie Ray Vaughan

I was taking a little break from editing Driftwork and realized that, my god, it's Saturday ... time for the Saturday Matinee!

I had dig fast but I think this one will do. Lots of great music. Today's matinee is a three part documentary on Stevie Ray Vaughan done by a couple of young Norwegian guys. I don't know where they got all the photos from his childhood, but it looks like they covered a lot of ground. I haven't had a chance to watch all of it but it gets good reviews. I'll have to watch it later but I hope that right now you can ....


Kick back. Take a break and enjoy the show.

Stevie Ray Vaughan:

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

Automatic letter writer

Helping animals has never been easier since I discovered IDA's (In Defense of Animals) fantastic, automatic letter writer. My god! That sentence sounds like the opening line in an ad for a veg-o-matic in a ladies' magazine but what the hell? It is a goddamn magic letter write-o-matic. Anyway, now I won't feel bad about asking people to write letters on behalf of downtrodden animals so watch out!

Here's how it works. All you have to do is pick the issue you want to address and click on the link. That takes you to the typical email campaign page containing a draft letter on the issue. You can email it as is or edit it as you see fit.

Now here's where the cool, automatic letter writing feature comes in. Once you settle on the words, click "confirm". At this point you can also print the letter out and mail it. Your printer will spit out a nice, clean, professionally formatted finished product ... your letter, as your wrote it, dated, addressed. Just push print and sign. It's great. It is the fast food of activism but not cheezy because a hard copy letter has a bit more heft than a form email. My printer spit out 6 lovely letters in about 10 minutes. Try one out. See how easy it is.

OKAY, that's it from the arm chair activist for now. I've got to get to work on Driftwork. Even on such short notice, and no promotion, we actually gotten some good submissions and the deadline is coming up fast. We're taking it to the printer on the 12th. By the way, we've extended the submissions deadline until this Monday, so think about sending something.

Please support Bill to Protect Animals Sold in Pet Shops

Please Support Ban on Force-Feeding of Birds in New Jersey

Stop Horse Massacre in National Wildlife Refuge

Help Protect Pacific Coast Marine Animals from Drift Gillnet and Longline Fishing

Urge Gov. Blanco to Approve Law Protecting Animal Companions in Emergencies






animal welfare activism pets letter writing

Campaigns Wikia

Jimbo

Here's a better link to Wikipedia's new political discussion wiki. At this point the structure of the wiki itself is being discussed but this page gives a better idea of the overall vision. I signed up yesterday but am still exploring the site. This is a new project by Jimmy Wales, the guy who founded the online collaborative encyclopedia, Wikipedia. For that reason alone it's got potential but, as the t shirt says, "What better place than here, what better time than now?"









Campaigns Wikia politics Jimmy Wales Wikipedia campaigns

Reno morning and the political blogosphere

So, I'm off to the see the doctor. He's supposed to take the stitches out today. That's the Big Event d'Jour so gotta go. In the meantime, check out Wikipedias new political wiki. I will do a longer post about it later but, it's all right here. Jimmy Wales has posted an an open letter to the political blogosphere. Looks really promising!